Biography of Maria Andreyeva-Olcheva

Born in 1884. Completed secondary school. Lived in Moscow and in her early years was an actress at the Moscow Art Theater. She was a member of St. Louis des Français parish and on friendly terms with the parish sacristan, Alisa Ott. In 1946 she began studying French with Irina Turchinskaya, a teacher at the Institute of Foreign Languages. In 1948 she began translating sermons from French into Russian for Fr. George Antoine Laberge, head of the parish. In January 1949 she was arrested on charges of having “over the course of several years maintained criminal contact with American intelligence agents [Fr. Leopold] Braun and [Fr. Antoine] Laberge, having visited their apartments and given them slanderous espionage information about the Soviet Union.” In 1949, at age 65, she was sentenced to 10 (?) years in the corrective labor camps [Special Board, USSR Ministry of State Security]. Fate thereafter unknown. Source: Ott
Variant Names:
Andreeva-Olcheva, Mari︠a︡ Aleksandrovna; Andreyeva-Olcheva, Maria
Moscow (Russia)
female; laity; fate unknown